


abrasion coast

by plumestrike



Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, POV Second Person, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:01:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24037045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumestrike/pseuds/plumestrike
Summary: Misa, things she's lost, and things she is and isn't. Or somesuch.Alt: that fucked up time period after misas' parent's murder that we don't talk about
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	abrasion coast

It is a week after your parents funeral, and you feel all awash. You watched your parents as their lives were cut short and saw their bodies in the morning paper while you were being held at the police station. On the news after you identified their killer in a suspect lineup you listened to evening specials about the tragedy of it and how young you were to be left alone and how traumatizing it all must’ve been, read internet articles of people dissecting every word of the leaked police report and on the unreliability of witness testimony. 

You saw the killer walk out of the trial room and you remember the bullets being shown as evidence, remember seeing them when they were first collected, handed off in little plastic bags by rubber-gloved doctors to overworked police officers.

The bullets that embedded themselves so very neatly in them, the way they slowly bled out your mother on the living room rug and ripped a scream from your father after he’d barricaded you in your room so you were safe and he was dead and cooling in the hallway by the time the ambulance came. You saw your mother and her ragged breaths being wheeled through hospital doors until you were sitting in a chair in the hallway with a police officer being told your mother was dead and cooling too.

The bullets that’ll probably be left to rot in an evidence room somewhere, that were enough to hold the killer in a cell on remand but not enough to keep him there even when they were enough to drag the last dregs of life from your parents’ bodies.

Their bodies were held in cold storage for months, and at their funeral you picked through their ashes. You placed a seashell in your mother’s casket and a paper doll in your father’s, and after the funeral a distant aunt you didn’t know you had and won’t see again helped you place your fathers’ bones in his callow urn.

During the funeral you accepted koden money from the handful of distant relatives you still have and won’t keep contact with, and from your parents’ coworkers who artfully refrain from looking you in the eyes. Your neighbors gave you soft condolences and pitying gazes and told you to knock if you need anything, anything at all dear, you poor thing just let us know. The housewife from across the street that helped you pack up your parents room patted your cheek and gave you a sad smile, ever since you’ve avoided her when taking out the combustible trash.

You received a snivelling hug from the friend that let you sleep on her couch before the yellow tape around your house was peeled back, and her mother has been guiding you in the process of putting the house up for sale because it was built for three to live in and two to die in.

You’ve been burning incense nonstop since then and the smoke is starting to sink into your clothes and recently you’ve been sleeping later and later into the day, and awake with a dry-mouthed, acrid taste at the back of your throat and a lead-back spine and limbs, you feel like a body in a cooler. You lay for hours until the orange flow of evening floods through your west-facing window and shines on your hair and pierces your eyes and you get up to light more incense, you’re a corpse in your own crematorium.

* * *

You go down to the coastline one day. The sky is a wash of greys and blues and the sky is a blur over your head, the wet sand under your feet as you dig your toes into the surf and the edge of the tide laps at your ankles as it washes in.

It’s a strong breeze, a moderate gale and the only thing you see is the break of the waves against the sand, the only thing you hear is the whistle of the wind in your ears.

The only thing you feel (the only real thing) is the sand rubbing raw into your skin, chafing your skin raw and getting into your clothes and your hair and your eyes, and you can barely distinguish the horizon line between sky and sea stretched out so far in front of you.

Your hair is in your mouth and it tastes like salt and grit, and you wonder if you hold it in long enough a pearl will come out.

( _You are a beautiful thing, and you will die one as well. You have come from a horrible ugly thing, you will mold with your own hands greater shapes than this, will become part of a larger than skin larger than life thing, dive deeper into it and make and meld it into your very being, and you will call that thing beautiful_ )

You are an in-between thing, you are the eroded coastline and the washed up dregs and the murky washed out skyline-seashore and the earth in the wind is flaking off your outermost layer of skin until it too is the shore, the sea, the coast, it’s own distinction more than you yourself, as one piece, will ever get.

You don’t go to the beach anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to the song I listened to on repeat while writing this, "where no endings end" by karen ann  
> Isn’t it kind of fucked up that Misa not only had to witness her parents murder, but also deal with not only the legal fallout and judicial bullshit, but the negative/sensationalist media attention that it apparently garnered. Also got me thinking about what other stuff she’d have had to deal with, like I’ve had to deal with the bureaucracy around wills and let me tell you it’s complicated and I don’t get it.
> 
> But that she had to deal with all of that like? A year before canon DN on top of entering into a modelling career and subsequently almost being the victim of another violent crime is super fucked up. Also I haven’t actually read death note past chapter ~30 so most of what I know about her backstory is from her wikia page lol, sry if anything is inaccurate there just. Is not a lot of information given on her backstory at all and it stresses me out, apparently she had an older sister in the manga, but not any of the other versions?? Fucked. Anyway this fic was written by death note the musical gang.
> 
> I admit I tried to stay vague regarding the judicial / funerary process stuff because that shit complicated and it’s honestly hard to find detailed information on what would actually happen in such a specific case. Like, in regards to how funerary rites or mourning would work in the case of murder victims, or the process of acquisition of bodies when they’re kind of also evidence or whatever.  
> So yeah lol, what I do know about though is that I’ve watched a lot of videos on how fucked the criminal justice system is, especially in regards to the way victims are very often both completely shut out from it, and the way media / the long drawn out legal proceedings often work to retraumatize victims.  
> Good video that mentions that here for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiX0_CXFWP8&t=131s
> 
> The other thing this fic was about was me complaining about how shitty windy beach days are and desperately trying to figure out how to incorporate my knowledge of the beaufort wind scale. Like seriously have you ever been to the beach when it’s super windy? It’s disgusting and having sand being blown into your eyes while it also gives you friction burn is definitely one of the worse experiences you can have.


End file.
